It felt like quite a strange decision from Disney to forsake its originally planned five-season run for Andor to instead serve up a monster second season that covered the four years between the first season and the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. But this was the route that was taken for a multitude of reasons.
Showrunner Tony Gilroy has explained many of these in a new interview with SFX magazine (thanks, GamesRadar+), where he noted that this more streamlined approach – where every three episodes spans a year of Cassian Andor’s life – was “born out of desperation”.
“We were halfway through shooting season 1, coming through Covid, and the monumental size of the show, the effort, and everything else was just dawning on us. We realized that I didn’t have enough calories to do it, and Diego’s face couldn’t take the timing, because it just takes too long to make it. We were saved by Disney saying, ‘Okay, if you guys can figure out a way to do it, we’re into it.'”
He continues: “It’s a fascinating experiment and I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it before. We’re going to jump a year between each block, and we’re going to use that negative space in a really interesting way, coming back for three days at a time, so it’s like a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. The challenge is, how do you come back [to start each chapter]? We wanted to have it be as elegant and seamless as possible, and just hit the ground running. There was a lot of experimentation to make sure that would work.”
Andor will return to Disney+ from April 23 (in the UK and Europe), and will offer each of its three-episodic-styled years per week until the grand finale in mid-May. You can check out the latest trailer for the series over here.